About Us

The Founders

Doug, Jenny, and Stanley the pig, who is partial to belly rubs

Founders Jenny Brown and Doug Abel moved to Woodstock as full-time residents in May 2004. Doug is a film editor and Jenny previously worked as a producer, director and post-production supervisor. They met while working for the filmmaker Errol Morris in Boston, while Doug played a key role in editing the Academy Award award-winning documentary The Fog of War. Other recent credits of Doug’s include Metallica: Some Kind of Monster, NBC’s TV series 30 Rock, and Louis CK’s show Louie. Jenny’s credits include work on the PBS series Frontline and Nova, ABC’s 9/11 special Report From Ground Zero and Discovery Channel’s A Transatlantic Tunnel documentary.

Jenny has been an animal advocate since the age of 18. Since the early 90’s, Jenny would occasionally volunteer her time working undercover as a videographer for several animal advocacy organizations. After her last week-long trip undercover visiting stockyards in Texas to film farmed animal abuse, she decided to give up her TV career and dedicate her life helping farmed animals and raising awareness of their plight. She moved to Watkins Glen, NY, to live and work at Farm Sanctuary and learn all she could about shelter operations and animal care. It was that essential experience that gave the couple the confidence to open up a sanctuary of their own.

Jenny, Doug and the work of Woodstock Farm Animal Sanctuary has been featured in The New York Times, Cosmopolitan, Rolling Stone, New York Magazine, HLN’s Issues with Jane Velez-Mitchell, NPR’s The Diane Rehm Show and more. Jenny’s critically acclaimed book The Lucky Ones: My Passionate Fight For Farm Animalswas released in 2012 and awarded Book of the Year in the 2012 VegNews Awards.

Strange but true! Doug has a condition known as Prosopagnosia or “face blindness” wherein he has a lot of trouble recognizing people, so don’t be offended if you’ve visited a few times and he greets you as if for the first time (for him, it is!).